School of Rock, a leader in performance-based music education, announced today their partnership with Troy, NY-based Outspoken Media as their SEO agency. This relationship will kick off the redesign and development of new national and franchise websites as well as ongoing digital acquisition and content marketing.

School of Rock is passionate about creating a legacy of music for the future by helping kids succeed in music and beyond. Outspoken Media CEO Rhea Drysdale said, “we’re excited to connect more kids and adults with School of Rock’s successful approach to music education. By performing music live, you experience confidence and gain benefits that will last a lifetime.”

The Outspoken Media team will craft creative and innovative SEO and content solutions that connect with School of Rock’s audiences and franchisees.

According to School of Rock CEO Rob Price, “Outspoken Media truly appreciates the importance of our mission to move beyond the traditional Guitar, Bass, Drums, Keyboard and Voice lesson. Through more methodical SEO, we will help new students find their local School of Rock location and advance content that conveys what is so special about our unique music franchise.”

Outspoken Media will work closely with School of Rock and their web design agency, Metajive, during the redesign, development and launch of the website. After launch, Outspoken Media will continue to oversee the brand’s SEO and content marketing strategy to drive more organic traffic, leads and enrollments for all franchise locations.

The new https://www.schoolofrock.com site will launch in the first half of 2018.

About Outspoken Media
Since 2009 Outspoken Media has been building loyal audiences for great organizations. Having worked with Fortune 100s, e-commerce companies, publishers, professional services, B2B, education and healthcare companies, Outspoken Media works closely with in-house teams to develop custom solutions to their most challenging SEO, content and reputation marketing opportunities.

To learn more about Outspoken Media’s SEO consulting services, visit https://www.outspokenmedia.com/services/search-engine-optimization/ or contact Outspoken Media at https://www.outspokenmedia.com/contact/ or info@outspokenmedia.com.

About School of Rock
School of Rock helps aspiring musicians master skills, unleash creativity and develop tools they need to thrive in life. Founded as a single school in Philadelphia, PA in 1998, School of Rock has become a rapidly growing international franchise operating over 200 schools in ten global markets. Since 2009, School of Rock has grown its student count from 4,000 to over 25,000. School of Rock has proudly been ranked among children’s franchises as the No. 1 Child Enrichment Program by Entrepreneur magazine in 2017.

For more information on School of Rock visit https://www.schoolofrock.com or call 866-695-5515. To learn more about School of Rock franchise opportunities or music lessons, visit https://www.schoolofrock.com/music-lessons or https://franchising.schoolofrock.com.

The post School of Rock Names Outspoken Media as SEO Agency appeared first on Outspoken Media.

Since this method of storytelling has become so popular, I gathered information about how users are implementing this format and what its limitations are.

Steller Stories

Steller is one tool that I am most excited to share. This storytelling mobile app and social network allows users to combine pictures, videos and text to create longer-format stories. I’ve been using Steller since its launch in 2014, and I am a huge fan of how it showcases content. My favorite part is how great the stories look when I share them on other channels.

Source: Steller.com

However, a few days ago I started to question whether the Steller platform is still effective for sharing my content because I haven’t seen much pick-up within my community. But, as I looked into the reasons why, I discovered that Steller recently partnered with Facebook to integrate Steller stories. This gives each story an instant lift, as it appears as a Facebook Instant Article on mobile. As a designer and social media marketer, this smooth user experience is exciting news for me. It means that I can share beautiful stories with photos, text and videos that auto-play with my followers — and, the stories will load quickly! Unlike Facebook Canvas, Steller stories can be viewed on desktop and still look great.

One of the brands I have noticed using Steller is GoPro:

When you share GoPro’s Steller Story on Facebook, this is how it appears on mobile:

This is how it looks on desktop:

Source: Steller.co/gopro/

What I love about Steller Stories

• Can be shared across social media channels
• They become Facebook Instant Articles on mobile
• They appear on desktop with great UX

Needs improvement

• There isn’t a button or clean CTA feature (I have only been able to create written links)

Facebook Canvas

Facebook Canvas is an “immersive and expressive” take on the storytelling format that allows businesses to tell stories and showcase products. Canvas allows the user to flip through a carousel, tilt to view panoramic images and zoom in to view detail. In my opinion, the best feature of Canvas is that it can include a call to action button.

Canvas, like Steller Stories on Facebook, is intended to load fast and offer a seamless experience. However, even though it’s very flexible and dynamic, Canvas has limitations. Canvases are built only for mobile, so there will be an error if a user tries to view on desktop. Therefore, the most common use of Canvas is for ads.

Source: Facebook.com

What I love about Facebook Canvas

• Creative features: full-screen images, videos, image carousels, full-screen tilt-to-pan images, and product sets
• Buttons and calls to action: allow you to go to a product page, blog post or website

Needs improvement

• Stories can only be viewed on Facebook
• Canvas only works on mobile

Instagram Stories

Instagram launched its “Stories” in August of last year. It allows users and businesses to share everyday moments (even the ones that don’t need to stay on the feed), but avoid oversharing. Instagram Stories can include photos, videos, and boomerangs in which you can add text, draw, and also do live broadcasting. Since the launch, more than 150 million users are using Instagram Stories daily and businesses have seen high engagement. Instagram also says that one in five stories on Instagram gets a direct message from viewers.

However, many clients struggle with strategy and creation of daily relevant content for these features. The good news is that Instagram recently introduced a series of tools to help businesses: full-screen ads in Stories and Stories Insights.

Source: Instagram for Business

Ads in Stories can use targeting, which serves ads to the specific audience you want to reach. Stories Insights allows business profiles to see the reach, impressions, replies and exits for each individual story.

Felipa Monteiro, Head of Digital Marketing at Mulberry, says that as early Instagram Stories adapters, they are impressed by the reach and the engagement. “Our recent campaigns that included a stories link, received 5X more clicks to site and engagement when compared to the average seen across our other social channels.”

Several big brands are testing Instagram Stories ads and it’s expected that they will be adopting the format soon.

Linking from stories is a feature that is being tested and is only available to verified accounts. I anticipate that this feature will eventually become available to non-verified business’ ads, as well.

What I love about Instagram Stories

• Organic Instagram Stories (photo, video, Boomerangs and live streaming)
• Instagram Stories ads
• Instagram Stories Insights (reach, impressions, replies and exits from each individual story)
• Audience targeting

Needs improvement

• Link from stories only available for verified business accounts

Snapchat

Snapchat, considered the pioneer of this storytelling format, says that 150 million people use the app every day and watch over 10 billion videos per day. This makes it a very popular channel for brands to deliver brand messaging or drive particular actions. Snapchat reaches over 41% of all 18- to 34-year-olds in the United States on a given day.

The same team that created the Snapchat consumer products has also worked on a variety of ad products to help brands reach their goals. These include video advertisements where you can swipe up and read an article, launch an app installer, show a long-form video or quickly access a mobile web page.

Source: Snapchat.com

What I love about Snapchat Stories

• Varied ad formats for different goals: articles, app installs, long-form videos, web views
• Audience targeting

Needs improvement

• Snapchat stories can only be viewed and shared within Snapchat

BONUS: Twitter Moments

Later last year, Twitter opened its Twitter Moments feature to all users. This allows each user to curate a series of tweets to create a slideshow version of a “story”. The way this canvas displays the story is different from other social media channels. Photos, videos and GIFs are included with a tweet that appears at the bottom of each slide.

Twitter, itself, uses this feature to showcase events happening around the world. Below, I’ve included examples of brands using Twitter Moments creatively in other ways:

Here, Twitter is demonstrating how to create a richer story using Moments:

Tips & tricks for making a great Moment

Mashable was able to capture reactions to the Microsoft Surface Book reveal by using Twitter Moments:

Microsoft Unveils The Surface Book

Budweiser told a little of its own brand history about how its beverage cans represent America:

America Is In Your Hands

What I love about Twitter Moments

• Always accessible from your Twitter profile: When you create a Moment, it is saved under your profile and can be shared any time or edited later to add more tweets.
• Building stories together: Moments allow a user to interact with the community. Twitter Moments showcase tweets from influencers or users that interact with your brand or campaign, strengthening the relationship with your community and making a collaborative story.

Needs improvement

• The strategy might differ from other social media channels. Since the format of this feature is different from the other social channels, there is a chance the strategy and the way you tell your story on Twitter through Moments will change. I personally see Twitter Moments as a tool that comes at the end, as the story has already been told through a period of time, to tie it all together and as a way to repurpose content one more time.

Tell your story!

I’m excited and have too many questions after exploring these popular storytelling tools and features. Is Facebook going to allow users to share Instagram Stories on Facebook and display as Instant Articles? Are we going to see more storytelling apps popping up? How are brands going to use the storytelling format to improve “customer experience”?

I look forward to seeing how this storytelling format is evolves (or not) and how both brands and users continue to create and consume content. Are you thinking of using any of these channels to create stories? Are you as excited as I am? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The post Social Media Storytelling: Tools & Features to Use In 2017 appeared first on Outspoken Media.

(And, to be totally honest, it’s 8pm and I’m doing some keyword and SERP-level analysis for a big social piece we’re creating for a client. Naturally, I turned to Moz’s amazing Keyword Explorer tool, but I was in a different browser and wasn’t logged in. That’s when I stumbled on the series’ first example, which is what gave me the idea in the first place! Gotta give credit where credit is due.)

Reputation Marketing Example #1:
Moz’s Personalized Login Page

When you log into Moz something unexpected happens depending on your time of day–you get a little welcome message that’s personalized with these delicious graphics and gorgeous lettering:

Go check out the magic for yourself here: https://moz.com/login

How fun! This is quirky and exactly what I’d expect from Moz, because it captures three of Moz’s brand values (TAGFEE)–it’s Authentic to the Moz brand, Fun for users, and Exceptional in its simple, but innovative implementation.

I smile each time I log into Moz. This type of psychological cue has to shape my perception of the brand and builds strong associations that strengthen the reputation of Moz in the deep recesses of my lizard brain… a brain that has now been triggered to salivate at the very thought of logging into Moz. Because, “Yes, I do want a delicious sweet to get me through a long night of content review and writing!”

The element of surprise!

What I like most about Moz’s login page is that it’s both surprising and personal. One of the most important ingredients in a great reputation is the element of surprise. It can be difficult to understand what this means or how it applies to your business model.

Moz is software for marketers. They’re a B2B who found a way to create an engaging brand with elements of surprise hidden all over their site and laced into every hands-on experience you have with them. This is part of their DNA and culture and is why Moz has been so successful to date even amid difficult periods like the recent layoffs they had in August 2016. Their reputation makes it easy for the industry to hang in there and get excited about what comes next, because they take the time to give something to their community even if it’s just a little treat to the world:

Even a login page can be beautiful. #Moz #Design pic.twitter.com/BpBAfEmG44

— Rewind & Capture (@RewindCapture) February 22, 2016

Diving into @moz for @CodeTankLabs this morning. They have the politest login screen I’ve seen so far! pic.twitter.com/HxIczknROd

— Brad Miller (@_bradmiller) March 2, 2016

When you’re trying to drink less caffeine in 2016 and you login to @Moz…#coffee #coffee #coffee
#itsonlythe8th pic.twitter.com/NSIee8CdG0

— Rhonwyn Crownover (@RhonwynJeannine) January 8, 2016

Diggin’ the current @Moz login screen :) pic.twitter.com/wpFqeACKiR

— Ryan Bollenbach (@gotboompah) October 8, 2015

It’s been a while since I’ve typed my @Moz login password but hey this background makes my work day even better! pic.twitter.com/kLAa5KVaEt

— Elsie De Stoop (@mohow) May 28, 2015

The @Moz login page is the perfect way to start the day. What a treat! pic.twitter.com/VULb2I00J7

— Duncan Lawrence (@dncnlwrnc) April 24, 2015

Nice touch on the login page! Good morning to you @Moz pic.twitter.com/r59ObLTZFb

— Caitlin Boroden (@CaitlinBoroden) April 22, 2015

Loving the new, uber-friendly login screen for @Moz. #SEO #deliciousapples pic.twitter.com/os1FGW79VY

— Alex Quaye (@digitalwhat) April 21, 2015

(Apparently most of you are morning people!)

When was the last time your login page was shared by a pleasantly surprised community?

Most brands stop at a standard, navigational portal for users. Some might customize the login page with their brand colors and fonts as well as helpful links.

I suspect the brands who take a few minutes to implement these tiny surprises have more established brands and better reputations, which makes growth much easier to achieve long-term. This is the core of reputation marketing in my mind and why I will continue to push for widespread adoption of this discipline until everyone is sick of it or until every brand has a reputation marketer on their team (or baked into their daily routine)!

How do you make something like Moz’s login background for your site or app?

1. Decide whether this is right for you. What type of personalization aligns with your brand values and message? Will it resonate with your constituents or does it have the potential to upset or simply not impress them? Think through the potential responses you’ll receive before you put the time in, or worse, execute and discover a backlash.
2. Get the right people in the room. Start by getting the people who need to be involved in the same room or conversation (unless one super human can do it all!).
3. Figure out where it goes. Is the login page the right place for your audience? The homepage? Other?
4. Determine creative direction. Are you doing something as whimsical and casual as what Moz did or is your brand more traditional? Find the right balance for you and create using the appropriate colors, fonts, graphics or illustrations, and tone.
5. Add it to your site. You’ll want to make sure the code works and does not conflict with other functionality on your site or app. In this example, Moz used JavaScript and CSS to assign different backgrounds based on a given user’s time of day, but you can do lots of different things to create a unique experience for your visitors. Here’s one possible solution for this exact feature published on Stack Overflow.
6. Remember to track your results! Does this negatively or positively impact related calls to action or other important metrics impacting performance? Setup monitoring to capture all possible mentions for your brand across social channels or other websites. Use tools like Google Alerts, Social Mention, or Moz’s own Fresh Web Explorer to listen in (or any number of small to enterprise-level listenting tools!). If what you’re doing is visual, you can also use Google Image Search to locate potential shares.

Credit: It looks like this creative was designed by Derric Wise. See more from Derric here. The entire Design Team at Moz cooks up beautiful work, which is visible here.

The post Reputation Marketing Tactic #1: Moz’s Login appeared first on Outspoken Media.

That didn’t make sense to me and I had to investigate. I mean, enterprise-level SEO platforms have evolved to handle the heavy lifting of analysis, content management, reporting, competitive intelligence, and even some best practices and SEO recommendations, but they don’t replace PEOPLE, right?

That’s what I thought and still firmly believe, but that’s not what is happening.

Like any good SEO, I looked closer (using SEO tools… oh the irony) and was amused by some of the keywords the enterprise SEO platforms are optimizing their content and other activities around:

• SEO company
• SEO companies
• SEO marketing
• SEO management
• SEO firms

Ok, it’s not a coincidence, it’s a conspiracy–SEO platforms really do think they’re SEO people.

I understand that each platform is a phenomenal toolset powered by great minds and is often in the hands of incredible marketers. Regardless, I’m an SEO agency owner who is pretty diligent about understanding my competition and was shocked to hear recently from not one, but many clients that they were torn between whether to work with Outspoken Media, BrightEdge, Conductor, or seoClarity.

Wha?!

I had a lot of metaphors lined up for this, but I’m going to leave that part to you; “trying to decide between an SEO platform and an SEO agency is like, _____.” (I am partial to: “trying to decide between an SEO platform and an SEO agency is like trying to decide between a going to a five-star restaurant for dinner or building a kitchen.”)

Thankfully, I’ve been an in-house SEO and I get it. I really do. Working with a set SEO budget means you have to make decisions based on your resources and needs, but I still don’t entirely understand the decision since most agencies come with their preferred enterprise SEO toolset available to clients. To me (as a biased SEO agency owner) the decision is a no-brainer–choose the agency who offers the toolset you want and get the best of both worlds.

Thankfully, our clients are as outspoken as we are. Here’s what one client had to say about the dilemma they face with SEO and their 2016 digital marketing spend:

1. SEO is increasingly complex and investments are difficult to tie to results
2. SEO platforms don’t provide perspective and trustworthy SEO strategy

This client chose to work with both a platform and us to help address their concerns.

It got me thinking though–we have a pretty robust toolset (more than what the average in-house team probably can afford), but I like to eliminate any sticking points in the decision-making process where our ideal client is concerned. So, in preparation for our own 2016 agency tools budget, I’m considering all of the big enterprise-level SEO platforms in addition to what we already have (Searchmetrics and STAT Search Analytics):

• Analytics SEO
• BrightEdge
• Conductor
• Ginzametrics
• gShift
• Linkdex
• RankAbove
• Raven
• Rio SEO
• seoClarity
• SEOlytics

Digital marketers shouldn’t have to choose between business intelligence and human intelligence. Good SEO agencies should provide both.

The same could be said for social media platforms like Falcon Social, NetBase, Hootsuite/UberVu, and Sprout Social. Social media and PR professionals also shouldn’t have to choose between social media management tools and strategists, but they do. Thankfully, the social media platforms aren’t as strategic about their SEO efforts as the SEO platforms and agencies don’t have to fret as much over competition in the search results (for now).

Is an enterprise SEO platform or an SEO agency right for your budget?

If you’re struggling with how to spend your 2016 digital marketing budget, especially where SEO platforms vs SEO agencies are concerned, here are some questions to help guide you:

• Do you need help building a digital marketing and/or search strategy?
• Do you need to improve your understanding of SEO and the future of search?
• Do you need help implementing content creation, outreach, and/or design and development?
• Do you need consulting and/or training for your teams and special projects?
• Do you need another set of eyes for quality assurance and quality control?

If you answered yes to the above, you should consider working with an SEO consultant.

• Do you have educated in-house SEO resources, but need help prioritizing objectives?
• Do you need tools to help you track your site’s SEO performance?
• Do you need help identifying and tracking SEO issues across many pages?
• Do you want to keep tabs on your competition easily?
• Do you need help auditing content performance for compliance with SEO best practices?

If you answered yes to the above, you should consider evaluating SEO platforms.

If you answered yes to both sets of questions, you should look into both an enterprise SEO platform and SEO consultant or better yet, an agency who offers SEO consulting and enterprise tools to their clients within your budget range. We may or may not be a good fit for you. Consider reaching out and even if we’re not, we’ll do our best to pair you with someone who is.

The post The Battle for SEO Budgets: SEO Platforms vs People appeared first on Outspoken Media.

From Outspoken Media to you, our community–we thank you and hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

The post Outspoken Media Gives Thanks appeared first on Outspoken Media.

Consider this my official guest post on the demise of guest posting. Yes, this also makes me part of the reason why (as Matt says) we can’t have nice things in the SEO community.

Guest blogging is a tactic, not strategy

Let’s start off with the word “tactic.” I chose that word on purpose. We’ve all seen the plethora of “guest blogging strategy” posts and articles. I want to make one thing clear–guest posting is not a strategy. It’s a tactic. There’s a difference.

A strategy involves a long term plan and a goal. A tactic is merely one action that helps accomplish that strategy. I’ll get more into this in a minute.

It seems whenever an SEO tactic becomes popular, Google decides to take action on it. Why is that? Conspiracy theorists will be quick to update their usual argument about Google hating SEO and trying to sell more adwords and whatnot. Ignore them. Google doesn’t hate SEO. Google hates automated tactics that provide little value to actual website visitors such as creating links and content just to increase search rankings.

SEOs ruined guest blogging, not Matt Cutts

The reason Google is taking action on guest posting is because we ruined it. We ruined it the same way we ruined meta keywords, and directories, and press releases, and blogrolls, and widgets, and infographics, and link exchanges, and article submissions, and forums, and comments, and wikipedia, and (on second thought I won’t mention this tactic, it still works,) and reviews, and ratings, and Pinterest, and, well you get the picture.

We ruined guest posting just like we ruined everything that came before it and just like we’ll probably ruin whatever comes after it. It’s moments like this I’m glad Twitter isn’t a ranking factor, because I’m sure we’d ruin that too.

[Rhea note: actually, SEOs DID ruin Twitter when it and all other major social platforms were forced to implement nofollows!]

We went too “all-in” with guest blogging, and now we’re paying the price. For years it’s been the only link building tactic talked about at conferences and events. We even guest blogged about the best methods for finding blogs to guest blog on. Guest Blogging pretty much replaced the word link building in the same way that “[odd number] things [current trending topic] can teach us about [SEO|ORM|PPC|Mobile|Social]” replaced blog headlines.

Matt’s post shouldn’t come as a surprise. Anybody who’s been around SEO long enough knows that eventually all tactics are abused enough to find themselves in Google’s crosshairs.

SEOs need to fix our strategy, not the tactics

Guest blogging isn’t the problem though–we’re the problem. We can debate tactics all we want, but nothing is going to change. It’s the strategy that’s broken, and we need to address that.

It’s time our industry took a step back from the “what” and started taking a longer look at the “why” of SEO tactics. It’s time we put down our checklists and ranking factors and correlation studies and focused on our overall strategy and goals.

How SEOs brought the decay and fall of directories

How can we forget Danny Sullivan’s famous rant about directories and link building? If you missed it before, I’ll summarize:

A long time ago Google told us to go get directory links. At that time people actually used things like DMOZ or the Yahoo! directory to find sites, so it was good advice. The message was “go get your site linked where people will see it,” but all we heard was the word “directory.” Instead of trying to get our site mentioned in places where people actually went, SEOs started creating tons of directories nobody ever visited solely for the purpose of submitting our sites to them.

Directories weren’t the problem at all–SEOs just got the message wrong.

How SEOs brought the decay and fall of press releases

Sadly, we repeated the same process with press releases. The original message of “put out a press release, and if a journalist picks it up you’ll get lots of newspaper links” somehow got lost as we created programs to submit press releases to thousands of press release sites that have never been visited by an actual journalist.

(Tip: when the homepage of a site is geared toward getting you to submit and not toward actual site visitors, it’s not a good SEO strategy.)

Surely we learned after the PR backlash right? Nope.

How SEOs brought the decay and fall of forums and comments

We did the same with forum links and comment links. But we learned from that right? Of course not.

How SEOs brought the decay and fall of infographics

Like a moth to a flame we went full speed ahead into infographics. Sure, they started out useful. You’d see an infographic about population breakdowns that linked back to the census report or one about test scores that linked to some educational study. These were awesome and got tons of traffic. They were also relevant.

Somehow though, we forgot about the words “useful” and “relevant” and focused only on the word “infographic.” It’s almost as if we thought that somehow being attached to an infographic made spammy off topic links acceptable. Pretty soon we saw infographics about the best places to live in America that linked to play-poker-online-for-free-viagra.info

[Rhea note: actually, that domain is still available. Score!]

How SEOs brought the decay and fall of guest blogging

Then came guest blogging. At first, many in the community were saying things like “this can’t be ruined, can it?” “Nobody would be stupid enough to mix in total spam on their own blog or put their name on it would they?”

No, they weren’t that dumb. They were dumber.

Not only did people start posting utter crap, but they even created blogs that nobody ever read for the sole purpose of posting utter crap. Then, they automated it.

I’m pretty sure “automatically generate articles and send them to scraped email addresses until somebody posts them” is NOT what Matt meant when he used words like “high quality,” “original,” relevant”, and “value” in his original condonement of guest blogging.) In his condemning post, Cutts used the word “decay” and given our history with SEO tactics, I can’t really think of a better way to describe it.

It’s not the tactic that matters, it’s the strategy.

If your strategy is to expose your site to a relevant audience by creating useful content and connections, you can’t go wrong. If your strategy is to simply change the method by which you automatically acquire low-quality, irrelvant, and high-risk links, you’ll end up right back here reading this same rant from me in a different medium.

Spammy guest blogging is dead, not guest posting

Guest blogging can still work. You wouldn’t turn down a column on CNN or an editorial in the Huffington Post if they said you couldn’t have a dofollow link would you? Of course not, because those places send traffic – and that’s the key. It’s about the audience, not the HTML.

• This is a guest post. You’re clearly reading it because I (hopefully) have something interesting to say. There’s probably a link to my personal website or twitter account (I’m not sure, I didn’t ask for anything) but that wasn’t the purpose of this post. The purpose of this post was to share my thoughts and insights with an audience who might find it useful – and that strategy won’t ever die.
• The same is true for press releases. Those simply writing them for the links from press release sites won’t see any benefit, but those writing press releases that actually get picked up by journalists will see huge traffic influxes.
• Infographics? Same thing. If you’re summarizing your data and linking back to that data – well then any site including your graphic will gladly send their readers over to view the source of that data and learn more.
• Directories? Go ask the businesses listed in Angie’s list or APlaceForMom if directories are dead. They might not be getting rankings from them, but they’re getting phone calls.

Link building leads to ranking. Ranking leads to more traffic. That’s always how I’ve viewed it, yet some of us got so caught up in the link building tactics and ranking metrics that we forgot traffic was the actual goal. So yeah, these tactics may be dead from a link building, Google manipulating, Pagerank point of view – but if you approach them solely from a “send me more visitors” point of view, then they remain strong and viable.

Going forward I’m sure Google will have no problem finding guest blogs and ignoring their links and I’m sure several SEOs will find creative ways to disguise their guest blogs and manipulate Google’s author trust–just as I’m sure this won’t be the last guest post about guest posting.

Don’t worry though, I’m confident another SEO tactic will soon take its place; and it’ll only be a matter of time before we ruin that too.

The post A Guest Post on the Death of Guest Posting appeared first on Outspoken Media.

Wonder no longer–I surveyed the industry and we had a fantastic response!

Dear SEOs/Marketers, have 2 min to take a quick 5-question survey on industry backgrounds? https://t.co/QFWM1lD3kL TY and plz share!

— Rhea Drysdale (@Rhea) September 24, 2013

How long have you been performing SEO services (for your own or client sites)?

What is your highest level of education?

If you received a degree, what field was this in?

Did you take any online marketing, SEO, digital marketing, or related courses in school?

If you answered “yes” to the question above, please briefly describe the course, program, certification, or degree you received training in.

I collected the most relevant course titles, degrees, and classes shared by respondents:

• “Digital Marketing” module in degree
• Full Sail’s Internet Marketing MS program
• BCIT – Direct Response Marketing Program
• eCommerce master degree
• class in eCommerce at Virginia Tech
• Internet marketing course (x3)
• Digital entrepreneurship
• Internet marketing course during MBA (x2)
• E-Business during MBA
• Postdegree in digital marketing and communication
• Digital marketing course
• UGA New Media Institute Certification Program
• University module on online marketing principles

The best responses that seem to sum up the extent of everyone’s exposure to digital marketing and/or SEO during school:

“I took an internet marketing class as part of my undergraduate coursework. It basically involved me going to class and listening to a guy ramble on about his experience running a failed ecommerce website. Dabbled a little in analytics, but didn’t learn much.”

“I was doing a double major in English and business. I had a single course on online marketing. I dropped out when I realized I could learn more applicable things online for free.”

“The internet did not exist when I was in school… cut and paste was done with a scalpel and hot wax.”

“Yes, but barely. There was some online media and HTML courses, but nothing directly correlated with SEO or Internet marketing.”

What I found interesting is how the comments often led to folks discussing their own independent study:

“GAIQ and GA online study guides & tests; Code Academy html & basic javascript.”

What does all of this mean?

Well, I’ll talk about it from the point of view of a boutique, digital marketing agency owner:

Clients demand great work, but perhaps even more important is that we stay ahead of the industry when it comes to the services we offer. If I can’t find qualified candidates and continually train them, we’re going to get left behind as link development or online reputation management best practices evolve. You will, too.

So, do you have your training process worked out? Or, do you have a magical means of finding qualified talent?

After surveying the industry, I was fascinated by the diversity in our educational backgrounds. Yes, there are some common elements, but it’s exactly what I thought–most of us fell into this field from other disciplines. Less than ten percent of digital marketers had ANY training on the subject in school!

My takeaways:

• The industry is still in its infancy.
• It’s impossible to create a standard curriculum when search and technology updates happen daily.
• We’re all on equal footing when it comes to talent acquisition.
• And my favorite lesson–in the absence of traditional education, he who trains most efficiently will rise to the top.

That last part is pretty important to me, because I think (vain moment) that I’m a pretty damn good trainer. Don’t believe me? Check out the deck I created for the meet up at the end of the post. I’ll let my past team members share their thoughts on the subject.

Why does this matter? We’re about to ramp up the business heavily in 2014. It’s time to scale, and scaling digital marketing education is at the top of my mind, because I refuse to compromise on quality or our custom, in-house approach to the work. Unfortunately, training takes time, but that’s time I’ll carve out knowing it means we maintain team happiness, client satisfaction, and industry recognition. Hopefully, you’re thinking about the same things as a consultant, agency, in-house marketer, or executive.

The post Survey Results: Educational Background of Digital Marketers & SEOs Revealed appeared first on Outspoken Media.

SMX East 2013 Coverage: YouTube: Optimization Tips For the Second Most-Popular Search Engine

If the panel on YouTube optimization didn’t know their audience, I don’t know who does. It’s hard to win over a group of marketers the morning after a killer party (thank you Yext! Love those hummingbird cocktails!), but they came in with the perfect approach: brilliant tips, and a few videos appealing to that base level we all needed.

• Manny Rivas took the audience through strategizing your YouTube approach. B2B can be sexy too; you just have to tell a story to the right audience. Make sure you are optimizing your videos with annotations, and external links, but start with the keyword research.
• Thought leadership, tutorials, infographics, branded yet catchy, thematic series are all great approaches to creating video content. Video engagement success will be determined by research and relationships you build well before the video is created. Identify users by mining comments, and finding active users in the fields you are targeting.
• Purna Virji pimped everyone’s YouTube channels, and offered up tips for building a strong foundation for your channel, curating your content and engaging your visitors to keep them there, and using analytics to audit your efforts. To start with make sure you’ve made the most of your channel icon, and channel URL. Make your video metadata compelling with core keywords first, and branding later. With annotations make sure you avoid the lower third of the video, don’t obstruct content, and use analytics to test time and placement.
• You want to develop a subscriber following; you can customize your channel page for new viewers and subscribers, which offers a new experience for different kinds of users. Let your viewership know why they should become a subscriber, and commit to putting the effort into following through. To get a better sense of viewer process make sure you are looking at playback locations and traffic sources reports in analytics. To evaluate your user engagement make sure you use subscribers report to show which videos stand out, and to evaluate what kind of content works for you.
• Matt Siltala, social maven, emphasized the importance of certain user signals to monitor: you want user engagement with likes and dislikes, and full views. Use humor in a dryer industry like pest control, or use a targeted traffic approach by creating a video where the subject matter and title are specific things people are searching for to guide your content.
• Are you optimizing? Did you forget to link to your site? For shame! Make sure your using proper categories and GEO tagging. Share your videos across all your social profiles. Add your videos to your Google+ profile, it helps with authorship, and use those same social profiles for video ideas: local Facebook groups will give you insight into local community questions and needs. Lastly, repurpose your most successful content as a video.

Manny On YouTube Optimization and Marketing

You got your start in marketing through rap videos on YouTube, can you talk a bit about how your YouTube work for clients has driven value, and what kind of obstacles you’ve come up against, whether it was initial client buy-in, resource allocation, etc.? Also as a side note, that’s probably one of the cooler entries into marketing.

Surprisingly enough, there are actually a lot of similarities from what I was doing – posting rap videos to what we’re doing for clients, because at the core of what I was doing, I wanted to build a subscribership, a viewer base, that would come view my videos time and time again.

The way that I had to do that was find interested users. I would go out there and I would identify other hip-hop artists that were publishing videos and I would just engage with them. For a hip-hop artist one of the biggest things for us is attention to lyrics. The way that I found the most engagement and made sure that I got people back to check out my content, was I would listen to the lyrics of other artists that are trying to build their viewer base. I would comment and say, “Man, this line right here where you said …, was really cool,” or quote certain parts of their verses and more often than not you’re complimenting them, so they come and check you out.

But anyways, what we’re doing for clients here is the same sort of demographic research where we’re trying to find engaged, active users and when we start out with companies that are looking to start a YouTube presence, we have to find those individuals – it’s all demographic research. We have to find the most engaged users that we can potentially engage with and bring into our community.

Resource allocation is a big thing. Clients get so excited about what they could do with video, but they just don’t have the resources to commit to it. They have amazing ideas of what an amazing video would be; they just don’t have the resources.

It’s having an understanding of what you can do. Animation is a great way to effectively create video and communicate your message without having to pay for actors, or pay for a whole lot of voiceover acting and things like that.

We’ve also had wins with direct response in YouTube selling products. For one particular company, we increased sales of their products through selling on their channel page. When I’m thinking about video as a sales mechanism, you have to think about it as a landing page. It’s just like a landing page. You have to give enough information to the viewer to take them to the next step.

You think about if a viewer were to do a search in YouTube; they find your YouTube ad; they’re expecting to see a video, which they’re going to; they come to your video and if the searches that you’re targeting are intent driven, you should be able to target those individuals that are seeking or close to farther down in the funnel. If your video is able to answer their questions and take them to the next level, you shouldn’t have a problem converting them.

We were using longer form videos, there were two different lengths. There was one that was 17 minutes and one that was more along the 30 minute line. Once users get past a certain point in the video, we’re pretty confident that they’re going to convert. We were able to identify the searches that were the ones where users had a higher proclivity to convert, and optimize towards showing those users, or those people searching for those terms the right video. We were able to dramatically increase conversions since we came into the picture and started optimizing those video campaigns, which was a pretty good win.

You had a great article in Search Engine Land back in January about building a direct response funnel in youtube. What are some of the ways that you begin to think about process and strategies for individual clients? What’s in your toolbox?

In terms of driving sales with YouTube, like I was kind of saying before, I like to start by understanding how video can effectively communicate a particular product or service. Understanding, can video sell my blue widgets with one touch or are viewers more likely to come back or continue gathering information first after they watch the video?

There are three primary tools I use for doing direct response in YouTube, and those are the in-search ad unit, in-display, and the pre-roll, which is in-stream. I tend to use the in-search and in-display. I have found those to be more effective in terms of direct response.

In terms of building my campaigns and identifying search inventory, one of the most powerful tools that I have found is Scrapebox. Scrapebox is a tool that actually scrapes the AJAX suggestion box in YouTube. When you go to the search box and you start typing snowboard or something like that, and then there are a whole bunch of suggestions that populate below it, what Scrapebox does is scrape those suggestions.

YouTube has this keyword research tool and it sucks; it’s completely horrible. It doesn’t give you anything relevant. The best keyword research that I’ve been able to do is literally looking at the suggestions in the dropdown menu from YouTube because those searches, or those recommended queries are coming because they’ve been searched for quite a bit. There is high frequency in those areas, and people are either searching for those things or there is a lot of content out there. That’s where I like to start.

In that example of increasing success events with YouTube remarketing, one thing that we did was use custom thumbnails in the headline. What we were trying to do with the video was specifically get them to go back to the knowledge center or back to the site and get the free download for this particular white paper. The custom thumbnail really helped to prequalify the traffic because in the image that we’re using for the video, it talked about downloading the free guide. Not only did we have our copy in the ad, we had copy within the image that talked about what the end objective was. I think custom thumbnails are great.

External linking annotations, which are only available to certain advertisers if they are spending a certain amount with ad words per month, allows you to place external links in the video, at certain points in the video, to a particular page. You can usually look at analytics to determine when viewers are most engaged to put that annotation, and direct them back to the site.

Lastly, the video remarketing pivots around engagement. If you look at how or what these remarketing list options are, it’s things like “this viewer watched a certain video”, or “this viewer liked this specific video”, or “they disliked this certain video”. “They subscribed to your channel”; “they unsubscribed to your channel”. You can begin to develop some pretty customized messages to those individuals to bring them back or hopefully get them to subscribe again if they unsubscribed.

Manny On Retargeting

Can you talk a little bit about how complex the world of retargeting has become between search retargeting, site retargeting, Facebook exchange, etc.? What are some ways that marketers can begin to think about navigating that landscape?

No matter what the marketing channel or medium is, I think you have to know what to expect and just understand where those channels fit within the purchasing cycle or whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish.

It’s not necessarily that retargeting is just for e-commerce. E-commerce retargeting is just really common. You hear these examples of e-commerce as retargeting being a channel that can help out e-commerce marketers, but there are publications that use retargeting for their editorial calendar. We do that.

I think it begins with a fundamental understanding of the business, like understanding how long your purchase cycle is or what kind of information satisfies a potential customer when gathering information. Do customers often repurchase and how often do they repurchase? Do they buy the same items? Do they buy similar items?

Think about visitors that are coming to read your content. If you’re retargeting those, you’re going to want to make sure that they’re engaged users. What’s the threshold for determining an engaged user, do they view x many pages? Do they stay on the page for more than x many minutes? At what point, in terms of time on site are pages viewed, is a visitor likely to return? I think those are some basic questions that can help you determine how retargeting is going to fit into your marketing mix.

What are some of the bigger wins you’ve had for clients with retargeting?

With one client in particular, this is B2B, we effectively used YouTube remarketing lists, which in my personal opinion, are one of the most under-leveraged or under-utilized remarketing plays out there.

We used those remarketing lists to increase success events and those success events vary from actual sales to leads to white paper downloads. We effectively increased those success events using these remarketing lists because the content that they were publishing – this goes for any company that’s publishing helpful video content – if you’re driving users down the funnel in way that you’re starting with information – was informative pieces of content that drove them to the next logical place in the funnel.

You should be creating lists, remarketing lists for each step on the funnel so that you can remarket to those individuals and serve them ad messages that meet them where they’re at in the funnel. You know what I mean?

One of my favorite approaches is leveraging prequalified organic traffic. When I say prequalified organic traffic, make sure that these users are engaged. I only want to retarget people that have been on the site for more than three minutes and viewed more than four pages or something like that. It gives me an idea that these users are a little bit more valuable and show a little bit more intent on my site than just any visitor to the site.

I like the idea of leveraging the organic side of that traffic to drive conversions. If you think about it, a lot of retargeting, you pay for the visitor once. Let’s say you do a search ad or a display ad and you pay for that visitor to come to your site. They go through; they might load up their shopping cart and then bail. You retarget them and that’s great, but you already paid for them once, so you’re paying for them again.

If you’re getting organic traffic for your site, you can set up organic lists of folks that are still coming in, loading up their cart, and possibly abandoning it and retarget those folks. Essentially, the first time that you’re actually paying for the visit is on the retargeting level so you know that they show some interest; they’re already aware of your brand, so that’s something that I always tend to try and set up whenever I engage a company. I will start setting up remarketing lists and retargeting lists within Google analytics because no matter whether or not they’re going to use it, I like to at least have the option there. That’s one practice that I just commonly do with new accounts.

Manny On Retargeting On a Limited Budget & Not Being a Creep

If I have a limited budget, what type of retargeting would be best? Or are there certain businesses where certain retargeting methods work better than others?

Yes, I like to identify my most engaged users. We work with some of the largest household brands in the world, and we work with some of the coolest startups too. The cool thing about really large brands is you have tons and tons of data. With smaller brands or really cool startups that are just getting their start, you are working with small sets of data. So what I like to do is identify the most engaged users.

They might be 25 users on a list, but those are my 25 best friends. It’s not always about targeting a massive audience. Many times it’s just about targeting a small number of your biggest fans. I keep saying it over and over, but targeting users who have spent so much time on your site and visited so many pages, is a good place to start. If you’re seeing that your list is growing and growing and it’s bigger than you want to commit to adding dollars to, then pick apart the amount of minutes that they have spent on the site; really dig down into how engaged these users have to be.

Keep in mind through this, that if you’re targeting a small group of people, you don’t want to creep them out. One of the balances with retargeting is making sure that you’re not being a creep, so you want to make sure that you’re adding frequency caps per day and make sure that there is a life span on those remarketing lists so that they don’t just go on indefinitely and keep serving those users ads.

Manny on Holiday Retargeting & SMX Sessions

With the holidays approaching, what are some tips for retargeting for ecommerce providers?

I think you have to start early, so start targeting and building your audiences early. I’m personally a procrastinator when it comes to this type of thing and holiday planning, but there are a lot of people out there that are not and hunt early, like my wife.

I would start early to build those lists, because I think that there are folks out there that are starting the planning, and you have the opportunity to build lists around certain categories of your products, or certain areas of your business, and communicate with them as they begin to make their purchasing decisions. Right now they’re most likely doing information gathering, so I think starting early is very important.

The other thing is to focus on devices. We don’t want to forget about smart phones and tablets and how these devices are being used in the buying cycles. Many people, myself included, will be on their smart phones researching a product while they’re physically in the store. It’s an opportunity for e-commerce businesses to stay competitive with brick and mortar and offline means of sales.

I think search targeting also presents a unique opportunity, because a lot of the inventory that you are getting within Chango, and other search remarketing platforms out there, are taken from shopping sites. These are people searching within shopping engines. I think search retargeting is an excellent place to consider retargeting for the holidays.

What SMX session are you looking forward to the most, and why?

Well, of course, the Pro-level Tips for Succeeding at Retargeting and YouTube Optimization! I was interested in Richard Albonzi’s keynote, because I just want to see where Twitter is going next and with the new release of Twitter’s social retargeting, I’m curious if they’re going to make any advancements with that, or if they’re going to make any changes/updates to that type of retargeting. I know there are some limitations to it.

The post Manny Rivas on YouTube & Retargeting: SMX 2013 Coverage appeared first on Outspoken Media.

SMX East 2013 Day 3:
Content: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

• Andrew Melchior recommends that you use Reddit and subreddits as a great place to submit your content to and find content ideas as well as Google News, Yahoo, Bing, and Tumblr. Spend time on the sites where the customer lives. On product pages don’t just discuss product details, but product experiences.
• Arnie Kuenn suggested marketers use Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer to check competitor’s content for back links to see where they got coverage. For B2B find questions people are asking about your services and craft posts about those (not posts about you!). Use whitepapers and guides to track potential leads and demonstrate content success/performance.
• Jenny Halasz recommends you use the who, what, why, where, how method when crafting content for your audience. B2B isn’t just “B to Boring” it’s about connecting with customers and you can shift content to interest your audience, not just about your company.
• Dan Shure says you don’t have to start content through a blog, you could start small with a single piece and see how it goes. Most company blogs get no interaction. You need to add value. Check out Upworthy. Consider doing an 80/20 data analysis with your content. Measure search value (what content is being searched on), an often over-looked metric for performance tracking.
• Casie Gillette said marketers should use video to explain your services, which can be a unique content type that people are actually interested in. Content is a lot of work to keep up with though, be prepared for it. When tracking content success look at page views, shares, submissions/downloads on landing pages, always tie it back to your goals. Cypress North releases content marketing ideas for the upcoming month, which is a great way to find unique content topics. Write for your audience’s needs.
• Matt McGee is moderating, but threw in a tip to write about solving problems with as much detail as possible to flesh out product pages.

Casie on Developing Content Strategy

Casie is a superstar with content. We picked her brain on creating strategy despite obstacles, using local strategies to leverage content, and digital marketing in 2013.

How do you develop a content strategy for a client? What does that process usually look like?

For any client we start with the basics. We take a deep dive in to their business. We learn about what their goals are. Do they drive leads? Are they looking for online sales? Then we’ll start to get in to some of the keyword research stuff learning about the competitive landscape, and that kind of helps us better understand what their content needs actually are. I also love to take a look at like the search results to see what’s showing up for their key phrases. I find that extremely helpful just because it gives you a better idea of what their customers are looking for or at least what Google thinks they’re looking for. But it’s helpful because that way when you’re targeting specific things you know here are some of the things that are showing up. And then we’ll work with them to figure out what their resources are. What their budget is and how we can really get the biggest bang for their buck. If they don’t have a blog you know we’re not going to have them invest like thousands of dollars to create a blog if we can do something else. That’s really it.

How have you dealt with the challenge of creating good content for a client in the face of restrictions? (Whether they are budgetary/resource restrictions, on-site code freezes, or even a client with a different opinion on creating content)

You know unfortunately these things come up more than I’d like. I just had a client who was bought out by a larger company. We’d been working with them for a couple years, and we just developed like this great blog. They just get hundreds of thousands of visits, and it really is the core of our strategy. We have these set goals. We have traffic goals. We have lead goals and it’s driven by this blog strategy. Well, we found out that they’re basically shutting the blog down so they don’t want to invest resources. We’ve actually spent the last couple of weeks figuring out what else we can do. Now we have to look at offsite options. We have to look at their main site to think about do we add content there, what can we do there? We had to restructure what it is we’re giving them, and I think that the key.

There’s always a way to help a client with restrictions; it’s just thinking about what that actually is. Thinking outside the box if a client doesn’t have time is a big thing. It’s always budgetary or resource restrictions. If the client doesn’t have time to come up with a post one of the things that we’ll actually do is we’ll come up with topics, and then just do a short outline for them so that way they have it, and they don’t have to spend all that time coming up with topics. I think there’s always a way to work around. It’s just a little bit of restructuring and thinking about what else you can do for them that will help in the same capacity.

Have you ever worked with any clients that have industries that are just really difficult creating content for? How have you combated that issue?

Actually, we have a lot of tech clients and clients that it’s a very technical product that’s hard to understand, so we started doing content for one of my clients probably about six months ago. We had said, “All right. Let us help you write some blog posts,” and what we found is that despite how great our content writers are, it just really wasn’t what they were looking for in terms of technical capacity and knowledge, and they would spend a lot of time going through and correcting it. So what we just decided was the best way for us to give them useful content was to write things that were geared towards their marketing demographic versus trying to write things geared towards their CTOs. We just had to switch who we were writing for. Instead of trying to write those technical posts we just started writing posts that are more geared towards the marketing crew that are a little more basic and still giving them good content.

What’s one creative or overlooked content strategy or method that you’ve been using?

I’m a huge fan of using your customer service, which isn’t necessarily overlooked, but it might be underutilized. At my old company we actually had a couple of our customer service reps sit in on our marketing meetings to let us know what the biggest issues they were seeing were. I tell clients all the time who are using live chat or looking to use live chat, get a tool that actually keeps those questions and responses. It’s great for content. It’s easy to write, and then more importantly it’s what people are actually looking for. Those are the things that you’re not answering on your site. If someone is calling or someone is asking you things make sure you’re answering that. I always think it’s a really easy place to look and something that people don’t tend to think of.

Casie on Bad Content

What are some of the most common content mistakes that you encounter when you take on a new client? Or that you see in your day to day marketing?

I think sometimes what happens is we assume that what’s worked for someone else will work for this client, and sometimes it just doesn’t. Sometimes what we find is that a client isn’t as receptive as a different client, or their goals are different than what I thought their goals were. That’s why we’ve really started doing a lot more vetting at the onset to figure out what they are looking for and what they are open to, especially around content, because if there are brand restrictions, if there are things that they’re just not comfortable doing, and you know that we need that to do them to be successful, sometimes you just have to say, “This probably is not going to work.”

A lot of time, I think the other things is that people think I have to get content up. I have to get content up. I have to get content up. And you don’t have to get crappy content up. Take that extra couple days and spend the time to get good content up. We’ve dealt with that with clients and even internally going from we have to give them tons of content to just let’s give them more in-depth good content.

Speaking of content and outreach, there’s been a lot of news about Infographics, guest posts, and press releases being devalued. What do you think that the average business should be focusing on content wise?

You know I think it’s always smart to start with your own site, build it up, but yeah those third party things are valuable. Just because you hear Infographics are devalued, that doesn’t mean there’s not value in doing one. You can create one that’s really good and really relevant to your business and it’s going to be picked up. It might just be brand exposure. It’s the same thing with press releases. I tell my clients, “Don’t hesitate to issue a press release if you have something great to say.” Don’t issue them all the time just because you feel like it’s helpful. If you have something good to say, say it. Get that out there.

But I do think it’s always important to start with your own site, and then expand out. We do still try to get our clients guest posts but they’re on valuable sites. They’re on relevant sites where their customers are, and they’re going to get some exposure. I think that’s a big misconception: people get scared when they hear, “Oh don’t do this. Don’t do this. Don’t do this.” I think there’s still value in those things if you’re just not trying to exploit it.

Casie on using Local Strategies to Inform Outreach & Content

You did a post on local strategies and real life strategies for link building on Search Engine Land. Could you talk a little bit about kind of leveraging local connections for content or for link building and using your community to think about what you could be doing with your site?

Absolutely, I think even if you’re not a local business, or you don’t do business locally, there’s still a lot of advantages of interacting with your local community. I’m a part of the American Marketing Association, the Boston Chapter, and I’m involved with their social media team. It’s good for me but it’s also good for co-marketing because we get to go to some of these events. We’re talked about in the social media platforms and any business can do that. One of the things I had noted in there was just that when you think about the cost of doing national marketing or going to these national conferences it’s kind of crazy. People can’t afford to do that, but some of these local events get your name in front of smaller businesses or just people who could connect you better, and it’s a lot more affordable. Even if you’re going to be a sponsor for a local event, it’s definitely more affordable.

And then one of the other things is that I don’t think people think about that you tend to get a link when you sign up for events. If you have a bunch of people going to an event, that’s an opportunity to meet people, and an opportunity to get links.

Recaps are always another great opportunity and can help build locally-focused content. It’s also worth seeing if there’s any sort of community site associated with the organization putting on the event. For example, AMA Boston has a site called Connect where members can sign up and post. You’ll see articles on there discussing events, local marketing news, and it’s great for establishing local connections. On top of that you get a profile with your name, bio, a link (hooray), and it’s pushed out on their social channels.

I’m also a huge fan of the “What to do/What to see” posts that companies put out when a conference is in their city. I think it’s such a clever way to create content about your city, it’s helpful to industry friends and potential customers coming to the show, and those things get serious shares!

Casie on Keyword Research & Content Inspiration

What’s your toolbox look like for researching, gathering inspiration, and creating content?

Well, I use Feedly, I have had a blog reader since I first started in this industry and a lot of those same blogs are on it, but now I use it for clients as well. I love Twitter. I’m on it because there’s people based on your client or just even based on what you’re interested in. You can see some of those conversations happening. What the things are that people are talking about. What are the things that are happening in that industry? It’s a great place to get good ideas. Also, I still subscribe to Google Alerts. You know some of the basics are really helpful. If you’re looking at the right things I think you can get those tools to really work for you. A lot of times just doing a Google search is a great tool. If I’m out of ideas, just checking out what already been written helps. I use a lot of basic but valuable tools, nothing too groundbreaking.

Along the same line as restrictions, how do you think you are going to move forward with a big chunk of keyword data now not provided? How are you planning on working around that?

Probably for the past six to eight months I’ve already been incorporating Webmaster Tools data in to my report, in to the data, in to how we’re like looking at things. It’s super unfortunate, especially for our clients that are lead driven. They still need to know how people get to their white papers or get to their forms. Without that data it’s tough. We’re just using the tools that we have right now, looking at the Webmaster Tools data, etc. A lot of our clients do use ad words so there’s that, but it’s a little bit unfortunate that that’s the route that we have to take.

What SMX session are you looking forward to the most, and why?

You know I wasn’t sure until Googles announcement yesterday really solidified my response. The Life Beyond Google session I think it already looked pretty cool and it certainly isn’t groundbreaking idea but like, “Hey you need to do some different things here and not completely rely on Google,” but I think it looks cool, and the speakers are good. I think it’s just really important as a reminder, like don’t put all your eggs in like one Google basket. I think it will be good to hear and see some of the other things that people are doing to supplement their traffic.

The post Casie Gillette on Content: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly: SMX East 2013 appeared first on Outspoken Media.

The local panel had some real powerhouses: Matt McGee of Search Engine Land Moderating, David Mihm of Moz, Chris Silver Smith of Argent Media, and Dana DiTomaso, the CEO of Kick Point Inc. We’ve got some fantastic local marketing takeaways from the session below, and we were able to catch up with Dana before SMX.

SMX East 2013 Day 2:
Must Have Local Search Tactics Takeaways

• David Mihm took the audience through maximizing your local citations. Citation related signals are critical as a local search ranking factor, so make sure you are consistent on-site, and with critical platforms. Every store location must have its own page on the website; establishing your canonical locations should be a priority. Localeze, Factual, Acxiom, and Infogroup are all critical tier one platforms for the local search ecosystem, so make sure your information is correct.
• David emphasized the necessity be where your competitors are, Whitespark is a paid service that will do that research for you–make sure you are doing competitive analysis with other local and national competitors. Once you have the basics, think more creatively to get those mentions and citations: become the drop off site for school donation drives, host classes or events, make sure job listings are utilized, offer discounts for local hotels, alumni associations, etc. These all provide strong, high quality citations.
• Dana DiTomaso took the audience through PPC for local. First of all, make sure you label and name in your PPC campaigns; you want to understand your data. Use radius targeting in your enhanced campaigns to take advantage of user location for competitive terms. Add the local citation extensions; it can be a competitive differentiator with your ads.
• Be unexpected with retargeting ad placements: art gallery & restaurant, bike paths & bike tune-ups, running paths & shoes, farmer’s markets & wine, museums & bookstores, festivals & hotels. Build Facebook or LinkedIn demographics for retargeting to better understand your audience.
• Chris Silver Smith talked about best practices for structured data. You need to use semantic markup to aid search engines in interpreting your site correctly, and it can increase your chances of getting rich snippets appearing with your page in the search results. You can use both hCard microformating and Micro Data/schema.org, but Chris suggests moving towards schema.org. Webmaster tools has a structured data testing tool that you need to use.
• For businesses that are closely associated with their founder, make sure you are using the author tag. That author information is a valuable trust factor for local search. Likewise, logo optimization is an underutilized tactic, and reviews and testimonials can be marked up too. Maximize categories in Google Places, and engineer a great image for the carousel in search (make sure you have images in Google Places).

Dana on Creating Local Search Tactics

Dana is an all-around local SEO bad-ass. If you aren’t already following Dana on twitter, you should be: If not for her on-point commentary on local and search marketing in general, for gems like this. We were able to get her chatting about her favorite local search tactics, Google+ frustrations, and PPC segmentation.

What is your local search tactic checklist like? Are there any tactics that you think are losing importance? Others that were formerly overlooked and need to be used more frequently?

That’s funny, because I’m kind of revising our local tactics checklist right now. I think that the big changes have come from what we call “Google+, local, places, social, etc.” in the office, because the name changes from day-to-day. I think that’s been the big change for us, the frustration in having to deal with that is pretty time consuming. It’s incredibly difficult to get a straight answer from Google, on even something as simple as claiming a page. For example, if the client has a Google+ page and then they have the Google+ local page, you have to merge the two. Not even that, just the basics of getting that Google+ local page set up is so tricky.

We have a client who we’ve dealt with this for. I think we’ve got the pin, we set it up, Google accepted it, page isn’t showing up. Call Google, they’re working on it; check back in a week. Check back a week later, still not working. You know it’s just not working, and what do you tell a client? Other than: “Well Google doesn’t have their shit together.” You can quote me on that. I think for local SEOs it’s incredibly frustrating, because it does feel like that. Google doesn’t have their shit together. How can you expect to deal with a system that’s flawed and flaky, when it’s the key to showing up well in local search results?

So, we do everything else. We do citation stuff; we do all these NAP consistency, local citations, title tags, all the stuff you’re supposed to do in local SEO. But I think the number one thing that sucks up the most amount of our time is indeed that Google+ stuff.

Then we do a lot more PPC for local, which is what I’m going to be talking about at SMX East, because I think that not a lot of people talk about PPC for local.

What are some overlooked or creative ways that businesses can think about providing local content?

I think a lot of businesses get stuck in “I can’t be bothered to spend a lot of time on this,” and content seems like a lot of work. So, they have eight different neighborhoods that they service, and they take one piece of content and do a search replace on the neighborhood name, and then put that up.

I think instead, businesses need to focus more on finding real stories that are happening in their different locations, or even if they have just one location; and just start telling those stories. I think that those stories don’t have to come from the owner of the business, or the person responsible for marketing. I think that if you check in with all of your staff on a regular basis, just find out what’s going on.

Find that interesting story: look at your reviews, and look at what people are saying about you, and if there’s a story there that can be told. I think that it’s really easy content in the sense that you’re just asking for people to talk about themselves, which they love doing. Then you publish it on the website, and people are more than happy to promote that stuff. If a business reached out to a regular and said “Hey, we really like that you had your anniversary here, can you tell us why?” Get him to write about it, tidy it up for grammar and what not, and there you go, that’s content. Of course, they’re going to share it on their Facebook and then tell all their friends about it, who are probably going to share the story as well, “Hey, isn’t this restaurant great, they really care about their customers,” it’s easy content.

When it comes to small businesses, listening to those conversations and identifying stories, are there any tools or different methods that you would encourage your clients to use to listen to that conversation and segment out from the noise? Or do you find, more often than not, that there’s not a significant conversation happening with a small business, so it’s even tough to pinpoint?

I think sometimes we find out stuff when we’re just sitting there. I told this story recently in a presentation. I was sitting in the client’s waiting room, waiting for their dermatologist. I was just sitting in the waiting room, waiting to see my client, and I heard the receptionist answer the phone and talk about how, “Yes, you can get your tattoo removed while you’re pregnant,” and I thought holy crap, I didn’t know you could do that. We should really check that as a keyword, and indeed it was. We had a tattoo removal campaign, but pregnancy tattoo removal was not specifically in there. So we added it in, which really helped with getting more impressions for their phrases.

I think that just listening to stuff like that helps, when we’re waiting at a client’s office, we have really serendipitous moments where we get to hear things that the client normally wouldn’t mention in a meeting. So, we try to drag it out of them, or we try to show up a little bit early and just listen to what kinds of phone calls and stuff that people are getting, and kind of eavesdrop on the receptionist.

I also tell clients, when you have your staff meeting, ask people, “Hey, does anybody have any fun stories from last week that they want to share.” “Did anything really cool happen? Was there a fun customer interaction? Or, what are you really excited about doing this week at your job?

I think that it’s great to generate content, but I also think from a business building standpoint, you feel like your all part of the team, and the employees also like to see their stories being reflected on the company’s website. It makes them feel like they’re part of the company too.

Google+ driving ranking? Where do you stand on the debate?

I think that the jury is still out. I really like Dr. Pete’s study on it, I thought that was very good.

Then, when he talked about the ranking factors and where they’re going, what does usurp really mean? In Cyprus Shepard’s follow up, I feel like he tried to be a little bit more conclusive than the data actually is. There is definitely something to be said for a site that has really great content, and therefore gets a lot of shares. If it ends up ranking really well, is it because it’s a really good site with really good content that probably gets lots of links? Or is it because it got shared on Google+? That’s a difficult chicken and egg situation.

I also think that maybe Matt Cutts was being a little too disingenuous when he said, “No, no, no that’s not it, and then asked him to repeat the study with different variables. Come on. Here are some hints, and I’m going to get you to repeat the study using exactly these variables and then you’re going to get the result I want you to get.” That felt a little bit sneaky, but I feel like Google+ has absolutely influenced rankings. I think that the one take away from it that’s really important to note, is that sharing your content on Google+ does mean that it gets indexed incredibly quickly. So you’re showing up in the organics that much faster, which is good if you have news based content.

Dana on PPC Segmentation

When it comes to PPC in ads, how do you do segmentation? I know that you mentioned that your presentation at SMX is going to be on local tactics for PPC. Can you give us kind of a preview of what that looked like, and when you start to think of a campaign in terms of these fun, unique stories, how does that help with targeting specific groups?

What I’m going to be talking about has actually ended up being basically every interesting local tactic we’ve used in the last few months. I think what’s really interesting and what we’re doing right now is a campaign for the city of Edmonton. We’re using the new enhanced radius targeting, specifically for a bunch of recreation centers to push their classes. They have yoga and spin, and at some places they have swimming classes. So, if you live within five kilometers of the rec center, you’re seeing the ad for the rec center closest to you.

We just started the campaign a few weeks ago, and it’s going exceptionally well so far. You’re getting the rec center that’s right for you. The click-through rate on mobile devices is double what it is on desktop. The click-through rate for some of the ads like yoga, which is a pretty competitive craze here—I imagine it is in most places. We’ve even got as high as 4% and 5% click-through rate on some of the ads, and we’re using yoga broadly to start off with. It’s not the most precise keyword in the world right now, it’s pretty lazy, and we’re still getting a really high click-through rate. So, we’re impressed at what you can do in terms of radius segmentation.

Dana on “Not Provided” & the Future of Reporting

Google now seems to be making every single user go through a redirect to secure a search, which means we’ve now lost keyword data within analytics. I imagine that as a company that does both paid and organic search, it’s a little bit easier because you have access to those paid campaigns for keyword data. How much do you rely on paid search to help inform organic efforts?

I don’t know, for us it’s all part of one campaign. So, we’re thinking about the paid keyword data and what’s played really well, but often what we’re also thinking about is making sure that we’re just showing up, twice on the page. So, if it’s a phrase that the client is ranking well for, we’ll still run the ad word, just maybe with a lower bid.

Because I find that, and I think other people have proven this, too, that the click-through rate is better if you have PPC and organic on the same page than if you just have one or the other. Because they think, “Oh wow, this company’s all over here, they must be really awesome.” So, the ideal world is you have ad words and a places map marker come up, and an organic search presence, but you can’t always do that. At least you can try to get two out of three.

As for the not provided stuff, we’ve just stopped looking at organic data too deeply in the reports we give to our clients. I’ll still report on keywords, in the sense that I’ll look at the keyword data, and will yank out what is interesting. So, if there was a particularly interesting organic search term that came up, then we’ll say to the client, “Hey, this was really interesting, we might want to consider pushing this a little bit further.” But in terms of reporting on the actual keywords and keywords that converted, there is very little that we can do now. We were actually trying to phase out most of our clients from reporting on that data now anyways. From our client’s perspective, we’ve never focused heavily on reporting on that. The reporting that they get from us is based on how many leads they’ve got coming in, and what their cost per lead is, and what their cost per sale is; if we can derive that kind of information, if we have that ability to link it all up. So, from our perspective, as long as they’re still hitting their targets on leads and sales, then what does it matter if you know the exact keywords?

Can you talk a little bit more about reporting and showing ROI without that keyword data?

We try to establish a baseline. What are is the client doing now? It helps if the client hasn’t worked with an SEO agency before, to be honest. Because then they’re not asking us questions like “Well, how many links did you build for me.” They’re not ruined by the previous bad agency who was focused on the wrong matrix. Without that experience, we can say to them, “Tell us how much you want to increase your business by this year,” and “Can you handle that increase in business,” and “Let’s talk about your business plan,” and “Let’s talk about how many things you need to sell.” We have a homebuilder client, for them it’s really easy, did the home sell, yes/no? For them, they track when people walk into a show home, so we know how many walk-ins they got in the show home. We know how many people filled out the form from their website.

Perhaps we can say okay, so we know that you had x number of visitors at your website, and you had x number of visitors to your show home. Let’s take that as a percentage, just to provide us with a baseline. Then, looking at the last 12 months, before you started working with us, we can see that fairly consistently you have a certain percentage of people who walk into your show home shown as a percentage of website visitors. That percentage is very consistent. So now we know that if we increase their website traffic we should be able to drive x number more people into their show homes. So, we tell them this theory, and then we do our work and lo and behold the theory held out. Now we’ve managed to increase their website traffic by about 30%. We can see that we now have 30% more people walking into their show homes. Now, we know that not everybody who walked into the show home visited the website, but we can also see a pretty strong co-relation between increased interest in the website and increased interest in people walking into the show home. And then their sales team takes it from there.

But the other thing that we’ve seen is we also have data on the number of people who walk onto the show home versus the number of people who put in offers, and that conversion rate has been increasing, which means that we are helping to drive more targeted traffic to the show home than they were getting. They were getting a lot more tire kickers before, and now they’re getting motivated people.

Dana on Local for Big Businesses

Local tactics for the larger corporation, or multi-city businesses: what are some of the tactics big business should be using?

I think big businesses need to get themselves better connected with the areas that they serve on the local level. That’s one area where a little company can kick a big companies butt, is by being that connected.

Why do you feel that your local coffee shop cares about you? Well, because they know your name and everything else. But at the same time, they actually are involved in the neighborhood. I know that some big companies will just plunk down a store, and feel good about it, but other brands really care.

For example, in Canada you have Home Hardware, which is a national brand, and they do a really good job. What they’ve done is that they’ve basically purchased up all the mom and pop hardware stores across Canada, and obviously, their big competitors are Home Depot and Rona, which is, again, Canadian. So the options are the big box style hardware stores, and Home Hardware, which are typically smaller, sometimes in urban areas. Sometimes they’re the only hardware store in a very small town.

What they do is they is they tell the stories of the owners, like, here are the owners, and they’re part of the family, and this is where they live. This is why they care about the community. They really encourage them to make videos, and talk on social, and be really a part of the community. They don’t necessarily have a corporate policy. They don’t have somebody from on high saying well this is the stuff that you have to tweet, or this is the stuff that you have to Facebook, or you used you’re/your incorrectly. It actually makes it more authentic, as much as I hate bad grammar. It makes it more authentic in the sense that this is actually the store owner typing the stuff into Facebook right now. And maybe they’re not the savviest social media user in the world, but at the same time I think that it gives it an authenticity that people respect and it makes them feel like they’re more connected to the local community. So, even though Home Hardware might be more expensive than the big box store, or they don’t have the best selection necessarily, people feel really good about it, and they’ll shop there because they feel like they’re supporting the community, even though Home Hardware is actually a national chain.

What SMX session are you looking forward to the most, and why?
Prioritizing Your Search Marketing Efforts. I think that that’s really interesting, because one of the things that I personally find difficult about conferences, is that you come back and you’re like, I have eight thousand new things to try. I would love to hear from veteran marketers on how they prioritize what they do. I think you can always pick up some good tricks from that. I mean there’s lots that I’m interested in, but I saw that one in particular, because I can’t believe that’s happening at the same time as me. I’m also interested in “Choosing a Digital Marketing Agency,” just because I want hear what people say.

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